Trent Brooks, owner of Brooks Place BBQ pulls meat from his smoker before he opens his barbecue joint for business, Friday, June 21, 2013, in Cypress. ( Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle )

Trent Brooks, owner of Brooks Place BBQ pulls meat from his smoker before he opens his barbecue joint for business, Friday, June 21, 2013, in Cypress. ( Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle )

Photo: Nick De La Torre, Staff

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Trent Brooks, owner of Brooks' Place BBQ in Cypress, pulls meat from his smoker. Brooks cheerfully admits to doctoring his sauce and buying his sausage off site, but that's no matter - both are tasty sensations. less

Trent Brooks, owner of Brooks' Place BBQ in Cypress, pulls meat from his smoker. Brooks cheerfully admits to doctoring his sauce and buying his sausage off site, but that's no matter - both are tasty ... more

Photo: Nick De La Torre, Staff

Image 13 of 13

Brooks' Place smokes destination-quality 'cue

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The aroma of wood smoke and melted meat fats got to me as I pulled away from the Brooks' Place BBQ trailer in Cypress. I had driven all of half a block on FM 529 before I began fumbling inside the paper bags that sat beside me in the passenger seat. I felt around with one hand, hit aluminum foil, hauled out a sandwich, peeled back the foil and white paper wrappings, and took an enormous bite.

Blam! I don't think I'll ever forget how the clear, smooth flavor of red oak smoke brought out the best in the pulled pork that filled the sandwich to bursting. Shards rimmed in brown skin rained down on my lap, the irresistible bloom of pork fat filled my mouth, and my eyes widened to the point that I had to concentrate to stay in my lane.

"This is as pure as barbecue gets," I remember thinking to myself as I traveled along the industrial stretches of the onetime farm road that connects Cypress with U.S. 290 in the far northwestern part of the metro area. So full and complete was the effect of pork and salt and smoke, all cradled in a soft buttery bun, that I couldn't imagine tarting up the sandwich with my preferred trappings of raw onion and a bit of sauce.

At one point, I contemplated pulling into the parking lot of Thrustmaster of Texas so I could eat single-mindedly, but that would have meant putting my sandwich down to make the turn. Nope. Instead I grabbed a second sandwich, chopped brisket this time, and bit into that.

Blam again. Chopped beef sandwiches are often miserable catchalls for scraps and too much sauce, but this one was filled with nice chunks of brisket, some rimmed in carbonized crust, some trailing little gobbets of delicious fat, others sporting the deep rose tones of a serious smoke ring. Just like the pulled pork sandwich, the beef and buttery bun made a perfect whole that needed no embellishment.

I didn't stop eating even when I heard the alarming BLAT-BLAT-BLATTY-BLAT that heralds a flat tire. It wasn't mine; it was the guy driving next to me in a battered old compact. I barely missed a beat.

Bottom line: My life, if not my driving, is better with Trent Brooks' pure and passionately crafted barbecue in it. His shipshape little trailer with its pair of umbrella-shaded picnic tables, planted in a landscaped corner of an Ace Hardware parking lot, is a good 30 miles from my house in the near East End, and it's a drive I make gladly. I think of it as an excursion through a mutating industro-suburban landscape I'd never see otherwise, with the prize of great smoked meats, some unusual sides and the broadly smiling face of pitmaster Brooks at the end.

Brooks has plenty to smile about lately. Recently Texas Monthly put Brooks' Place on its reputation-making list of the state's 50 best barbecue joints. And his wares were among the hits of this spring's Houston Barbecue Festival, which is where I first sampled his excellent brisket.

So business is brisker these days on his obscure corner of FM 529 and Barker Cypress, where his trailer is so set back from the intersection that pilgrims are constantly calling to get directions. (While I was there, I overheard Brooks instructing one lost soul, phoning from a nearby parking lot, to look "right in back of the 24-hour Emergency Care Center.")

Some friends and customers decorated Brooks' trailer with banners and streamers when he made the Texas Monthly list, and the remnants make the place look like a party has come and gone, leaving traffic cones decked with flowing tinsel and a canopy draped in a slightly expired "Congratulations" bunting. As a customer-appreciation gesture, Brooks is supplying free sodas through August, and you can rummage through a coffin-size Igloo for iced-down cans of Kroger-brand cola, pink lemonade and the like.

That's nice while you're waiting in 95-degree heat for your order to come up. But it's a measure of my love and respect for Brooks' work that once I got my three-meat plate on my first visit, my awareness of the heat fled. I was too fixated on the extravagant smokiness of his short, meaty, neatly trimmed ribs, with a smoke ring that seemed to extend nearly all the way through.

The ribs had a bark that was taut and smoothish rather than crusty, with lots of tender meat that retained some desirable resilience. They are best eaten on the spot (the bark steams and softens in a to-go order), either on a combo plate or as part of an old-timey rib sandwich that is nothing more than three ribs tucked between two slabs of soft white bread.

I love that retrograde sandwich. Like the pulled pork and chopped brisket versions, no sauce, onions or pickles are necessary - in fact, they just get in the way of the elemental goodness. There is something about charry meat drippings that elevates the packaged white bread and makes a curiously majestic whole. You can use a piece of bread as a sling to carry the rib mouthward, then rip off a piece now and then if you feel the urge to dip into a side cup of tart, peppery barbecue sauce.

About that sauce: "It's partly mine," Brooks admits cheerfully. By which he means he doctors a potion made by others to put his own stamp on it. Which is fine by me because the results are more to my taste than almost any sauce in town, with little sugar to pull its singing peppery flavors down and none of that awful liquid smoke that so dishonors a pitmaster's skills.

Brooks doesn't make his sausage, either, but he gets it from a producer on Houston's north side, and it's very much in the tradition of African-American barbecue here: coarse and slightly crumbly and jumpy with red and black peppers, in either an all-beef or a beef-and-pork grind, depending on what's available. I liked it a good deal, but it was Brooks' ribs, pulled pork and brisket that turned my head.

I particularly admire the brisket for its well-modulated salt rub, which always keeps its place; and for its rim of sumptuous, well-rendered fat, which you can enjoy if you order your brisket from the fatty end. Fatty or lean, my samples have never been too dry for me, a frequent failing. And I must say, at risk of catcalls from my Southern friends, that Brooks' pulled pork has enough moisture, crackly-and-soft fat and translucent smoke flavor to hold its own anywhere in these United States.

Pulled pork is usually an also-ran for me in Texas barbecue joints. Yet I keep trying it as it increasingly works its way into the Texas genre, and I have to say Brooks' Place is the first pulled pork I'd put up against a temple like Sweatman's, in South Carolina, without a shred of embarrassment. It's that good.

Brooks' sides are a mixed bag. A couple feel like mere placeholders to me: a sweetish cabbage slaw; a bland potato salad. Go for the ones that would not be out of place on a soul-food buffet. Both the long-simmered green beans and the roasted, skins-on garlic potatoes fairly vibrate with red pepper flecks. And so, surprisingly enough, do the tiny baked beans, which are lively enough to give doctoring a good name.

I wish I could give a better report of the peach cobbler, but it's the usual sludge of canned peaches with cinnamon and slabs of once-crisp crust folded in to the Styrofoam serving cup until they turn to a paste.

But you are not here for cobbler, my fellow Texans. You are here for your smoked, meaty birthright, consumed in the summer breeze off what was once open prairie, with the music of a hardworking electric generator filling your ears and the intoxicating smell of burning red oak logs filling your nose.